It takes at least two countries to make a deportation happen: one to send deportees and one to receive them. Typically, the receiving country agrees to take back its own citizens, but the Trump administration is developing other options.
The U.S. has sent hundreds of deportees, most of whom appear to be Venezuelans, to El Salvador, where they are being held in a maximum-security prison notorious for its brutality. The U.S. has sent migrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa to Panama and Costa Rica, including families with young children.
The Trump administration is also in early talks with the Rwandan government to send deportees to the central African country, and this month the U.S. made plans to send Laotian, Vietnamese and Filipino migrants to Libya before backing down in the face of a court order. (Representatives of Libya’s warring governments have since denied making any agreement to accept deportees from the United States.)
The expansion of the administration’s third-country deportation program appears to have two aims in the service of its overarching goal to remove millions of immigrants from the United States, including both undocumented immigrants and those who have legal status but are viewed as undesirable by the administration.
The first seems largely tactical: It creates a process to remove migrants whose countries of origin don’t want them back. Venezuela, for example, only sporadically accepts deportation flights from the United States.
The second aim, it appears, is strategic: Convince immigrants, documented or otherwise, that staying in the United States is so risky that they should “self-deport,” lest they end up in a brutal prison. It’s a campaign designed for deterrence.
Zooming out, there is another way to look at these deportations: By setting up third-country deportation agreements and claiming they are shielded from judicial review or oversight, the administration is trying to create an outsourced global detention system where rights to due process effectively do not exist, one run by mostly authoritarian governments that are trying to curry favor with President Trump.